MattBrady
11-28-2002, 09:08 AM
Exclusive contracts. Depending on your viewpoint, they’re either a boon or a bane to the industry. If you’re a creator, they can be either the promise of financial and job security, or the symbol of corporate comics. If you’re a fan, they can mean you’re getting a set number of issue by your favorite creator guaranteed over the next coupe of years, or a guarantee that your favorite creator absolutely cannot work on your favorite character for the next two years.
Where did they come from? What forms do they take? Newsarama started poking around and asking questions.
While there had been handshake deals and even some legal contracts assuring exclusive work by a creator for a publisher in the industry for years, current exclusive contracts can trace their roots back to the early ‘90s and Image. With the launch of Image, the door to self-publishing creator-owned comics opened for many creators. While self-published books had been around for a long time prior to Image, the launch of Image intersected with (or caused the creation of) the speculator market, and high readership. All three meant big bucks for the Image creators.
The money was a siren song for many artists and writers. Marvel and DC knew this, and ultimately had to get their own bellies up to the bar. Soon, there was a bidding war, with Image studios, Marvel, DC, Valiant, and a few others snatching up creators as soon as the ink on the pages was dry.
By today’s standards, the amounts of money being thrown at creators by the respective publishers to keep their creators sound ludicrous. One doesn’t have to put their ear to the ground for too long to hear stories of writers making $10-$15,000 per issue (and writing four monthly titles), with artists making even more, and prestige projects offering up jaw-droppingly huge paychecks. It was a heady time, and a seller’s market.
When the balloon popped in the mid ‘90s, exclusive contracts stuck around, but the money wasn’t the main issue for creators anymore - it was security. Within a year and a half, the market turned from “how high is high?” to “Oh God, where’s the bottom?” With self-publishing’s bubble popped and no title safe from the publisher’s axe, creators sought assurances that they would have work, and the shoe shifted to the other foot in terms of who had the advantage.
However, while exclusive contracts shifted to favor the publishers a little more, some old rules still continued through the mid to late ‘90s. “What we’re not doing at Marvel anymore, and one of the things that I was amazed to find was that there were exclusive deals that were being made that paid creators whether they worked or not,” Marvel Editor in Chief Joe Quesada said. “I wish I had known about those. Ultimately, that’s how Marvel got in trouble with a lot of it’s previous exclusive contacts – there were minimum guarantees, so you ended up having writers doing books they weren’t suited for, because you had to meet that minimum guarantee.”
Today, exclusive contracts have made a comeback of sorts, with publishers nabbing proven creators such as Ed Brubaker, Ed McGuinness, Warren Ellis, Kevin Smith, Darick Robertson, Michael Lark, Brian Azzarello, and Mike Carey to name a few between Marvel and DC, and of course there are the fifty-plus creators who work for CrossGen (which technically, isn’t the same agreement as a freelancer signing an exclusive deal with a publisher – more on that later), and a few others here and there at smaller publishers. Speaking about eh big guns though - make no mistake though – as many creators who’ve asked for, and been turned down – neither Marvel nor DC is offering exclusive contracts lightly. For those who’re after them, exclusives can be the brass ring on the industry.
And while overall, the number of creators who aren’t exclusive to a publisher far outnumber those who are, it’s still a solid phenomenon within the industry, given the name recognition of some of those who have signed exclusive deals.
And yeah – Quesada did name, early in his tenure, exclusive contracts as one of the problems of the industry, and is aware of how he looks now that Marvel has signed up some big name creators. “Unfortunately, my personal beliefs have little to nothing to do sometimes with running a business,” Quesada said. “Usually, on things like no foil covers, I can try and hold the line except when a madman like Bill Jemas decides to do his Marville thing. My belief, for me – I never signed an exclusive contract, and was never really big on exclusive contracts.”
But still – why sign a creator at all? First off, from the publisher’s point of view, why sign creators to exclusive contracts? To add a little certainty in an uncertain world, for one. For a publisher, Joe Blow being signed exclusively means that they will reap the rewards of Blow’s artistic output for the term of the contract. For the publisher, work is (somewhat) guaranteed, and the price for the output is set.
Speaking as the EIC, Quesada pointed to two factors being responsible for Marvel signing more creators to exclusive contracts recently – first off, other publishers.
“What has happened is that companies like CrossGen rolled have out, and are signing up guys to work for them exclusively,” Quesada said. “That starts a frenzy, and one exclusive leads to another exclusive among all the publishers. You don’t want your talent to be scooped up from you and taken away, and therefore one of the only ways to prevent that is to actually sign them to an exclusive, to prevent them from going exclusive with someone else.
“There are certain situations where if you hear another publisher is hunting one of your particular talents, you’ll go and talk to that talent. Sometimes, it’s not exclusivity – sometimes it’s just reworking their agreement to make sure they stay with Marvel. There’re no absolutes – it really depends upon the situation.
“Of course, people could say that we could pay more money to prevent them from going exclusive with someone else, but at the end of the day, if you’re going to pay top dollar, you don’t want that particular creator to be out there and work with someone else, especially when you’re spending top dollar to promote that creator and make sure that their name is in the limelight and responsible for a large number of issues that circulate through your business.”
Secondly, Quesada said that there are more exclusive contracts being signed at Marvel lately, because creators have asked for them. ““What was a very big surprise to me was how many creators actually want the exclusive,” Quesada said. “I think that was one of the things I said when I spoke about exclusive contracts was that I don’t believe in them, but if someone comes to me and asks for one, I’ll listen, especially if it’s a creator we really want to work with. I’d say about 40% of the exclusives that you’ve seen are people that have come up to us and said they’d be really interested in working exclusively for us.”
What of the promises made in exchange for the work, that is, the terms a publisher will offer a creator? There are some general terms, such as a better page rate, health insurance, and job security, but specific terms often depend on what the creator brings to the table.
“Every agreement is different,” Quesada said. “Some are based on a time contingency, some are based on the number of issues. It all really depends upon the creator and their track record was before coming to Marvel. If a creator, speaking hypothetically, has a very good reputation of always delivering their books within the allotted period of time, then time wouldn’t be a big part of their contract. The bulk of their contract would be how many issues can be delivered in a period of time, and can they deliver above and beyond what they normally do? If they do, we can perhaps add in some language about a bonus or an incentive.
But there are limits. “One of the things that you have to be careful with is – and this isn’t an absolute – but we try not to get into a minimum guarantee with creators,” Quesada said. “If a creator comes over and says they’ll sign an exclusive deal, but we have to guarantee that they have four monthly titles a year – we can’t do that. Even if that particular that person is doing four monthlies a year, we have no way of monitoring what the industry’s going to do. If the market starts crashing tomorrow, there may not be enough issues to go around.
“So we also don’t put a quota on people saying when we sign them, they have to produce x number of books. We might build in incentives – if they do a certain number of books, an incentive kicks in. Essentially, I look at it if we sign somebody, and they don’t produce a stitch of work, then they don’t get paid for a stitch of work. The solution to the minimum guarantee problem – if someone felt they weren’t getting enough work, and didn’t like what was going on, I’d be more than happy to take the contract and tear it up, and let them go. We don’t want to work with people who are unhappy working with us. That’s really the solution to all of these exclusive deals.”
What else? According to CrossGen VP, Product Development Tony Panaccio, some of the incentives Marvel and DC are offering creators stem from word getting out about the perks of CrossGen’s employment agreement. “Since we started offering health benefits, what do you think all the superstars did when they started renegotiating their contracts as exclusive freelancers?,” Panaccio asked. “They asked for and got health benefits. Now, there are freelancers out there who are looking at their page rates and trying to break the money down into paychecks that will come every two weeks, to have a little more security and cash flow, rather than depend on the voucher system. From our experience, many creators have seen the advantage of what we offer at CrossGen - when there’s significantly less stress, that is, when you’re not worried about money or more work, you can work better.”
For Warren Ellis and many other exclusive creators, Panaccio’s sentiment is true – by and large, while exclusive contracts serve a specific function for publishers, for creators, they offer a reduction in stress that comes with job and financial security.
“After the year I've had, the greatest appeal of this was relaxation,” Ellis said of his exclusive contract with DC. “For a while, I don't have to re-invent the wheel every time I want to put a new project out, I have the support of a large structure and I don't have to worry about every other person involved in each book. For a while, all I have to concentrate on is the writing. Right now, that suits me perfectly.
Darick Robertson likewise cited security as one of the motivators for signing his exclusive deal with Marvel. “With my five year run on Transmetropolitan ending, I wanted to be sure I had regular work and put out feelers for who might sign me up to a monthly gig and provide some health insurance for me and my new family - my wife and I just had a baby son last August,” Robertson said. “I had hoped DC would have stepped up, but they showed little or no interest in securing me to work for them. Meanwhile Marvel was loading my plate with great projects.
“Signing with Marvel really came down to three things: my artistic terms were met - I want to ink my own work in the future from here on out, and write as much as possible and that's a clause in my contract; I was offered health insurance; and Marvel gave me a very generous page rate increase that I couldn't possibly refuse. Overall, it was an excellent deal for me and Marvel seemed content just to have me working for them exclusively. Considering how much work I was doing for them anyway, it worked out great for everyone involved.
“With the contract, I become an employee of that company instead of an independent contractor, which looks better when I apply for a home loan, and makes income taxes easier to deal with,” Robertson continued. “I live on the East coast, and health insurance for a family here is very expensive - higher then some people's rent, so just getting the health benefits alone is a huge advantage in saving money for a home and providing for my family.”
Robertson’s mention of benefits and his new family is a recurring theme with many creators who have signed exclusive contracts. Often, the publishers know that creators with new babies can get the deer in the headlights look when it comes to their family’s financial security. As such, many recipients of exclusive contracts have small children. It’s not preying on creators at a weak time in their lives, but rather a mutually agreeable term of employment that’s beneficial to both.
And the same applies for those with broods, rather than just a single child. Security was far and away the biggest issue for me,” said Mike Carey. “I've got three kids, and I only gave up my day job - teaching - two years ago. It's still scary not drawing a salary. So having two years with a guaranteed level of income was an irresistible draw. Obviously it was attractive in other ways too, but if I'm honest that was the clincher.”
The security and benefits for a creator who’s also a young parent is something that even Quesada can understand, despite his personal dislike of exclusives. “When you work as a freelancer for your entire life, that job security is a really big thing, especially if you have kids,” Quesada said. “Maybe one of the reasons for my perspective on not becoming exclusive when I was freelancing had to do with me being single and didn’t have a kid. I was only responsible for myself. Maybe when I hit the freelance trail again some day – it may be next week, you never know, I might feel differently about it.”
Of the creators contacted, all reported that their contracts were tailored to their specific wants, from Robertson’s wish to ink himself, to Ellis’ stipulation that he be allowed to complete all his previous commitments on his own schedule. “That was one of its great appeals - that these guys had sat down and constructed a deal specific to my needs and approach,” Ellis said. “The deal breaker on my end was that I be able to fulfill my outstanding contracts, and at my own speed. I am told that Paul Levitz personally rewrote the usual DC exclusive deal to take account of that.
“I mean, they made a serious effort to accommodate me, and we all went into this with the stated understanding that my focus remains on new, original creator-owned work. The deal makes me probably the best-paid writer of creator-owned work in the American medium right now. I'd be a fool and a plebe to complain about this.”
Additionally, those who were willing to share reported differing “terms” regarding output, from Ellis’ stipulation of a set amount of work to fulfill his contract, to Carey’s 44 pages per month, and Robertson’s minimum amount of work in two years and others – Marvel and DC, according to their exclusive creators, have worked with them to make sure they are happy.
However, exclusive creators know that signing a deal like this is a tradeoff – if a DC exclusive creator gets a hankering to tell a Spider-Man story, it will have to wait, and likewise a Marvel exclusive creator who wants desperately to work with a DC character.
“It makes you a hostage to fortune in some ways,” Carey said. “If something goes wrong with your ongoing relationship with that company, you might end up in a situation where your work was being paid for but not used - which would be devastating when the deal came to an end. You'd be back out in the marketplace with no current credentials. I guess being genuinely freelance means you've got the best chance of keeping a very high profile.”
Also, as Robertson pointed out, comics can be somewhat political, and being in bed with one publisher for too long could affect you once you return to freelance status. “One can alienate themselves from the competition and if the contract ends, find they don't have anywhere to go, but that would be strange unless you really burned some bridges in the process. Another downside is that some writers I like working with and would like to work with have gone exclusive to DC. I won't be able to work with Warren Ellis again for a couple of years, and I never got the chance to work with my friend Brian Azzarello, and now they both are exclusive to DC. In some ways though this will force me to stand on my own and do what I can to emerge as a creator and hopefully write more and create my own titles, or make a mark on a title I'm working on.”
Either perceived or real, the limited flexibility and somewhat prescribed route a creator must travel (that is, creating what fits within the publisher’s breadth) were cited by some creators who do not, and aren’t seeking exclusive contracts.
“I like my freedom,” <a href="http://www.manofaction.tv" target="_blank"> Joe Casey</a> said. “I like the chance to act on opportunities that might come up that I never would've anticipated. I see exclusivity almost like employment. You're no longer a freelancer... you're an employee of the publisher. I'm much better suited to be my own boss right now. It's works for my particular lifestyle.
“The way the industry is right now, I don't think anything would persuade me to sign exclusive with anyone right now. Whether or not I'm exclusive doesn't affect my working relationships, so I'd prefer to stay independent. But there's not a publisher out there that could provide me with enough varied opportunities to persuade me to sign exclusive with them.”
And from Phil Hester: “Everyone I know who's been exclusive was working on a project that they ‘saved’ for when they would be out from under it.”
Ellis cited the same slight drawback. “If they don't like an idea of yours, you can't take it anywhere else. If it happens, I'll survive. I have lots of ideas.”
So what about CrossGen?
While they’ve been mentioned briefly in terms of exclusive relationships with creators, CrossGen stresses that it’s agreements with its writer, pencilers, inkers, letterers, and colorists are not like those that Marvel and DC have with theirs. According to Panaccio, CrossGen’s paperwork are “employee agreements (an example of which, CrossGen supplied to Newsarama),” not “exclusive contracts.” Just semantics? Not in Panaccio’s eyes. Essentially, CrossGen’s agreements with its creators go a few steps further than an exclusive contract with another publisher.
“From the employment agreement, the compensation we pay our creators includes regular paychecks, subsidized healthcare, insurance, and benefits plus profit sharing and equity,” Panaccio said. “So while the work is owned by CrossGen, the employees in turn own a piece of CrossGen. They’re guaranteed that, on the back end, as the profitability becomes greater for the company, they will actually reap benefits.
“Although, with most companies, when you talk about a profit sharing arrangement, in most companies, the investors have to recoup their investment, plus x percentage before any employees get any taste of profits,” Panaccio continued. “In our case, Mark is forgoing being paid back his initial investment in order to make sure that when profit comes into the company, the staff gets the first taste, which is something that any Wall Street Journal reported would call Mark nuts for doing.”
As a side note – CrossGen only owns the finished product – the artists own their art.
Original art is returned to them once a month once the books are printed. Founder Mark Alessi only asks for the right to get first dibs at buying some of the art before its returned for his personal collection and to hang on the walls of the CrossGen studio.
The main difference between CrossGen’s relationship with its creators and Marvel and DCs, said Panaccio, is the equity and profit sharing. This, according to Panaccio makes the CrossGen relationship much better than just an exclusive contract.
“On a freelance basis, an exclusive contract just means that nobody else can hire that particular creator,” Panaccio said. “Under this particular kind of employment agreement, it does more than just say, ‘You can’t work for anybody else,’ it helps ensure continuity, because we’re providing reasons for the artists and writers to stay within the company. We’re showing them the benefit of the payoff on the back end.
“How many issues did Jim Cheung do at Marvel? Not many. What was the benefit of him being exclusive? There really wasn’t one. The benefit of having him here with our agreement is that we have Jim, doing nine to ten issues a year at the highest level of his talent. I don’t think that’s something that anyone can argue – this is where the subjective crosses over to the objective.
“Let’s be honest, freelancers can get away with tanking a few pages out of 22, because half the time the editor’s just happy to get the damn page on time anyway. In this setting, you can’t tank a panel, and we’ve taken away the reasons why people would do less than their best work – they’re motivated and inspired to do their best.
“Our agreement motivates and inspires people, and it actually makes them want to be here,” Panaccio continued. “Many exclusivities become the ball and chain after a while. Once the creator gets out from under the yoke, it’s, ‘Thank God, now I can do what I want.’ Here, it’s a little bit different – they know they’ve got back end participation, they know they’ve got part ownership. They know that there is a greater level of satisfaction for them above and beyond.”
Because CrossGen employees are part owners, Panaccio said that there’s a fundamental difference in how they view the company compared to how exclusively contracted creators view their respective publishers.
“Because they have a piece of the action, they think more like this is their money,” Panaccio said. “If they steal a paper clip, a percentage of that paper clip is theirs anyway. So they look at it with the same fiscal responsible that your CFO is going to look at it with, which makes these decisions infinitely easier – they see the logic.
“For example, to cite a recent decision, if it’s money coming out of their wallet, they’re going to realize that it doesn’t make sense to bring a creator like Scott Beatty down here just to have the luxury of him being here. They can make do for the time being and do what they can to work together as a team.
“There is absolutely no doubt in anyone’s mind that the quality of the book would be enhanced by having him here in the studio all the time, but when you run the cost-benefit analysis, it’s very difficult to figure out just how much better the book would be, versus the amount of money that you’re going to spend to get that level of quality enhancement.”
Panaccio also pointed out the flexibility in the CrossGen agreements, citing Ron Marz and George Perez’s non-CrossGen work as examples of allowing creators to complete work they’d already committed themselves to. Also, Panaccio explained that no contract has a distinct term of employment. All are open-ended, and ongoing. “If a person wants to leave, all they have to do is give their two week notice,” Panaccio said. “Conceivably, everyone could come in here and do that today. That’s one of the prime differences between our agreements and exclusivity at other publishers – they’re stuck. If a creator figures out after one year of a two year deal that they hate the arrangement, too bad. They’re stuck with it for another year or pay a lawyer money to get them out of it.”
As such, any reference to CrossGen contracts having “terms” of one year or multiple years were most likely tied, according to CrossGen sources, to moving expenses, which CrossGen provides for their new creators. If the creator stays with CrossGen for a year, the loan is forgiven. If the creator does not stay for the full year, they must repay the company.
With all the perks, there are some stipulations to the CrossGen agreements. While they are generally flexible, Panaccio said, they’re not tailored to fit each individual creator. As such, creators (with a couple of exceptions) must move to Tampa. Also, there is the much ballyhooed three-month non-compete clause.
“For the purpose of solicitations, we can’t let our stuff become returnable,” Panaccio said. “If someone chooses to leave two weeks from today, we’ve already solicited books with their name on them, so you have to give us that window of 90 days, so we make sure that whatever we solicit is actually what’s going to be what comes out. But, like I said, if you put in your two-week notice, you’re gone. In special circumstances, we make special arrangements. Caesar’s a perfect example –here’s a guy who left his extended family in California, and now he has some issues he has to go out there and deal with. He came to us, and we placed him on sabbatical so he could take care of his situation. When he’s ready to color again, we’ll welcome him back with open arms. I would defy anyone to find copious examples of that in mainstream comics over the last ten years.”
Summing it all up, Panaccio said his best evidence for the employee agreements between creators and CrossGen is visual. “Look at Paul Pelletier’s Teen Titans versus Paul Pelletier’s Negation, if you look at Jim Cheung’s X-Force versus Scion, if you look at Butch Guice’s anything versus Ruse – if you look at the level of improvement in the artists, there’s an unmistakable fragrance of quality that has come from the guys’ work they have done here that did not exist to that extent with their previous work.
“Creators create well when they’re inspired and they’re motivated. Out in the freelance world, there are no guarantees, so artists are trying to do 10 or 12 pages in a week, or working their asses off to get the next gig. They have to be salesmen 20-30% of the time, just trying to get gigs, and the other 70% of the time, they’re trying to get caught up on the work they weren’t able to get done. It becomes this monster cycle that burns out and kills creators. Juxtapose that kind of existence against having a paycheck every two weeks, having taxes taken out, health benefits that you can attach your family to, and part ownership in the company you work for. Everything we built here at CrossGen was to engender both an environment and a legal justification for creators to feel comfortable, motivated, and inspired so they can do their best work on a regular, ongoing basis. I think we’ve achieved that.”
At the end of the day, creators, Quesada, and Panaccio all agree that exclusive relationships, be they contracts or employment agreements are having an effect upon the industry, and aren’t going away any time soon. Although no one is saying that every creator will sign on with a single publisher, virtually all contacted see more creators signing them in the future than less.
“Freelancers are the backbone of both companies,” Robertson said. “However, I think it's wise for Marvel to hire on guys that they can rely upon to put out regular books with a degree of quality that can be relied upon. I appreciate deeply that Marvel sees me as one of those creators and feel personally fulfilled that I have arrived at this place after years of struggling and working hard in this industry that I love like a bad girlfriend. I've seen both companies throw a lot of money to creators who seem to disappear form the shelves afterwards and produce very little. Ultimately, the industry will always rely upon freelancers, but in the end, with CrossGen employing a great deal of the creators that used to be Marvel and DC's mainstays, it has sent a message that camps are being formed and the best way to ensure you're going to have good books is employing and compensating the people that you can depend upon to produce said books. DC has offered exclusives to writers and Marvel seems to be going for artists, so that may speak volumes about what to expect from those two companies in the years to come.
“All in all, I think that as an industry, it's high time we reexamine the way comics are made when it comes to creators,” Robertson said. “There should be more compensation made to older creators, and chances for a healthy retirement. Companies as big as Time-Warner should be rewarding loyalty with loyalty. This cutthroat attitude that has forced many silver age artists to suffer in their later years when they are no longer commercially viable is disappointing and pathetic. Ultimately it drives the better creators to greener pastures, and leaves the comic industry a lesser place. The industry's best and brightest are looking for a better deal, perhaps in Hollywood or in advertising, when they could be creating their masterpieces for Marvel & DC or CrossGen. I hope that the idea of exclusivity is a growing trend that may lead to a more stable environment wherein to create comic art and will take the desperation out of our industry. With all the evolutions that comics have gone through, that is the one idea that needs to evolve as well.”
Where did they come from? What forms do they take? Newsarama started poking around and asking questions.
While there had been handshake deals and even some legal contracts assuring exclusive work by a creator for a publisher in the industry for years, current exclusive contracts can trace their roots back to the early ‘90s and Image. With the launch of Image, the door to self-publishing creator-owned comics opened for many creators. While self-published books had been around for a long time prior to Image, the launch of Image intersected with (or caused the creation of) the speculator market, and high readership. All three meant big bucks for the Image creators.
The money was a siren song for many artists and writers. Marvel and DC knew this, and ultimately had to get their own bellies up to the bar. Soon, there was a bidding war, with Image studios, Marvel, DC, Valiant, and a few others snatching up creators as soon as the ink on the pages was dry.
By today’s standards, the amounts of money being thrown at creators by the respective publishers to keep their creators sound ludicrous. One doesn’t have to put their ear to the ground for too long to hear stories of writers making $10-$15,000 per issue (and writing four monthly titles), with artists making even more, and prestige projects offering up jaw-droppingly huge paychecks. It was a heady time, and a seller’s market.
When the balloon popped in the mid ‘90s, exclusive contracts stuck around, but the money wasn’t the main issue for creators anymore - it was security. Within a year and a half, the market turned from “how high is high?” to “Oh God, where’s the bottom?” With self-publishing’s bubble popped and no title safe from the publisher’s axe, creators sought assurances that they would have work, and the shoe shifted to the other foot in terms of who had the advantage.
However, while exclusive contracts shifted to favor the publishers a little more, some old rules still continued through the mid to late ‘90s. “What we’re not doing at Marvel anymore, and one of the things that I was amazed to find was that there were exclusive deals that were being made that paid creators whether they worked or not,” Marvel Editor in Chief Joe Quesada said. “I wish I had known about those. Ultimately, that’s how Marvel got in trouble with a lot of it’s previous exclusive contacts – there were minimum guarantees, so you ended up having writers doing books they weren’t suited for, because you had to meet that minimum guarantee.”
Today, exclusive contracts have made a comeback of sorts, with publishers nabbing proven creators such as Ed Brubaker, Ed McGuinness, Warren Ellis, Kevin Smith, Darick Robertson, Michael Lark, Brian Azzarello, and Mike Carey to name a few between Marvel and DC, and of course there are the fifty-plus creators who work for CrossGen (which technically, isn’t the same agreement as a freelancer signing an exclusive deal with a publisher – more on that later), and a few others here and there at smaller publishers. Speaking about eh big guns though - make no mistake though – as many creators who’ve asked for, and been turned down – neither Marvel nor DC is offering exclusive contracts lightly. For those who’re after them, exclusives can be the brass ring on the industry.
And while overall, the number of creators who aren’t exclusive to a publisher far outnumber those who are, it’s still a solid phenomenon within the industry, given the name recognition of some of those who have signed exclusive deals.
And yeah – Quesada did name, early in his tenure, exclusive contracts as one of the problems of the industry, and is aware of how he looks now that Marvel has signed up some big name creators. “Unfortunately, my personal beliefs have little to nothing to do sometimes with running a business,” Quesada said. “Usually, on things like no foil covers, I can try and hold the line except when a madman like Bill Jemas decides to do his Marville thing. My belief, for me – I never signed an exclusive contract, and was never really big on exclusive contracts.”
But still – why sign a creator at all? First off, from the publisher’s point of view, why sign creators to exclusive contracts? To add a little certainty in an uncertain world, for one. For a publisher, Joe Blow being signed exclusively means that they will reap the rewards of Blow’s artistic output for the term of the contract. For the publisher, work is (somewhat) guaranteed, and the price for the output is set.
Speaking as the EIC, Quesada pointed to two factors being responsible for Marvel signing more creators to exclusive contracts recently – first off, other publishers.
“What has happened is that companies like CrossGen rolled have out, and are signing up guys to work for them exclusively,” Quesada said. “That starts a frenzy, and one exclusive leads to another exclusive among all the publishers. You don’t want your talent to be scooped up from you and taken away, and therefore one of the only ways to prevent that is to actually sign them to an exclusive, to prevent them from going exclusive with someone else.
“There are certain situations where if you hear another publisher is hunting one of your particular talents, you’ll go and talk to that talent. Sometimes, it’s not exclusivity – sometimes it’s just reworking their agreement to make sure they stay with Marvel. There’re no absolutes – it really depends upon the situation.
“Of course, people could say that we could pay more money to prevent them from going exclusive with someone else, but at the end of the day, if you’re going to pay top dollar, you don’t want that particular creator to be out there and work with someone else, especially when you’re spending top dollar to promote that creator and make sure that their name is in the limelight and responsible for a large number of issues that circulate through your business.”
Secondly, Quesada said that there are more exclusive contracts being signed at Marvel lately, because creators have asked for them. ““What was a very big surprise to me was how many creators actually want the exclusive,” Quesada said. “I think that was one of the things I said when I spoke about exclusive contracts was that I don’t believe in them, but if someone comes to me and asks for one, I’ll listen, especially if it’s a creator we really want to work with. I’d say about 40% of the exclusives that you’ve seen are people that have come up to us and said they’d be really interested in working exclusively for us.”
What of the promises made in exchange for the work, that is, the terms a publisher will offer a creator? There are some general terms, such as a better page rate, health insurance, and job security, but specific terms often depend on what the creator brings to the table.
“Every agreement is different,” Quesada said. “Some are based on a time contingency, some are based on the number of issues. It all really depends upon the creator and their track record was before coming to Marvel. If a creator, speaking hypothetically, has a very good reputation of always delivering their books within the allotted period of time, then time wouldn’t be a big part of their contract. The bulk of their contract would be how many issues can be delivered in a period of time, and can they deliver above and beyond what they normally do? If they do, we can perhaps add in some language about a bonus or an incentive.
But there are limits. “One of the things that you have to be careful with is – and this isn’t an absolute – but we try not to get into a minimum guarantee with creators,” Quesada said. “If a creator comes over and says they’ll sign an exclusive deal, but we have to guarantee that they have four monthly titles a year – we can’t do that. Even if that particular that person is doing four monthlies a year, we have no way of monitoring what the industry’s going to do. If the market starts crashing tomorrow, there may not be enough issues to go around.
“So we also don’t put a quota on people saying when we sign them, they have to produce x number of books. We might build in incentives – if they do a certain number of books, an incentive kicks in. Essentially, I look at it if we sign somebody, and they don’t produce a stitch of work, then they don’t get paid for a stitch of work. The solution to the minimum guarantee problem – if someone felt they weren’t getting enough work, and didn’t like what was going on, I’d be more than happy to take the contract and tear it up, and let them go. We don’t want to work with people who are unhappy working with us. That’s really the solution to all of these exclusive deals.”
What else? According to CrossGen VP, Product Development Tony Panaccio, some of the incentives Marvel and DC are offering creators stem from word getting out about the perks of CrossGen’s employment agreement. “Since we started offering health benefits, what do you think all the superstars did when they started renegotiating their contracts as exclusive freelancers?,” Panaccio asked. “They asked for and got health benefits. Now, there are freelancers out there who are looking at their page rates and trying to break the money down into paychecks that will come every two weeks, to have a little more security and cash flow, rather than depend on the voucher system. From our experience, many creators have seen the advantage of what we offer at CrossGen - when there’s significantly less stress, that is, when you’re not worried about money or more work, you can work better.”
For Warren Ellis and many other exclusive creators, Panaccio’s sentiment is true – by and large, while exclusive contracts serve a specific function for publishers, for creators, they offer a reduction in stress that comes with job and financial security.
“After the year I've had, the greatest appeal of this was relaxation,” Ellis said of his exclusive contract with DC. “For a while, I don't have to re-invent the wheel every time I want to put a new project out, I have the support of a large structure and I don't have to worry about every other person involved in each book. For a while, all I have to concentrate on is the writing. Right now, that suits me perfectly.
Darick Robertson likewise cited security as one of the motivators for signing his exclusive deal with Marvel. “With my five year run on Transmetropolitan ending, I wanted to be sure I had regular work and put out feelers for who might sign me up to a monthly gig and provide some health insurance for me and my new family - my wife and I just had a baby son last August,” Robertson said. “I had hoped DC would have stepped up, but they showed little or no interest in securing me to work for them. Meanwhile Marvel was loading my plate with great projects.
“Signing with Marvel really came down to three things: my artistic terms were met - I want to ink my own work in the future from here on out, and write as much as possible and that's a clause in my contract; I was offered health insurance; and Marvel gave me a very generous page rate increase that I couldn't possibly refuse. Overall, it was an excellent deal for me and Marvel seemed content just to have me working for them exclusively. Considering how much work I was doing for them anyway, it worked out great for everyone involved.
“With the contract, I become an employee of that company instead of an independent contractor, which looks better when I apply for a home loan, and makes income taxes easier to deal with,” Robertson continued. “I live on the East coast, and health insurance for a family here is very expensive - higher then some people's rent, so just getting the health benefits alone is a huge advantage in saving money for a home and providing for my family.”
Robertson’s mention of benefits and his new family is a recurring theme with many creators who have signed exclusive contracts. Often, the publishers know that creators with new babies can get the deer in the headlights look when it comes to their family’s financial security. As such, many recipients of exclusive contracts have small children. It’s not preying on creators at a weak time in their lives, but rather a mutually agreeable term of employment that’s beneficial to both.
And the same applies for those with broods, rather than just a single child. Security was far and away the biggest issue for me,” said Mike Carey. “I've got three kids, and I only gave up my day job - teaching - two years ago. It's still scary not drawing a salary. So having two years with a guaranteed level of income was an irresistible draw. Obviously it was attractive in other ways too, but if I'm honest that was the clincher.”
The security and benefits for a creator who’s also a young parent is something that even Quesada can understand, despite his personal dislike of exclusives. “When you work as a freelancer for your entire life, that job security is a really big thing, especially if you have kids,” Quesada said. “Maybe one of the reasons for my perspective on not becoming exclusive when I was freelancing had to do with me being single and didn’t have a kid. I was only responsible for myself. Maybe when I hit the freelance trail again some day – it may be next week, you never know, I might feel differently about it.”
Of the creators contacted, all reported that their contracts were tailored to their specific wants, from Robertson’s wish to ink himself, to Ellis’ stipulation that he be allowed to complete all his previous commitments on his own schedule. “That was one of its great appeals - that these guys had sat down and constructed a deal specific to my needs and approach,” Ellis said. “The deal breaker on my end was that I be able to fulfill my outstanding contracts, and at my own speed. I am told that Paul Levitz personally rewrote the usual DC exclusive deal to take account of that.
“I mean, they made a serious effort to accommodate me, and we all went into this with the stated understanding that my focus remains on new, original creator-owned work. The deal makes me probably the best-paid writer of creator-owned work in the American medium right now. I'd be a fool and a plebe to complain about this.”
Additionally, those who were willing to share reported differing “terms” regarding output, from Ellis’ stipulation of a set amount of work to fulfill his contract, to Carey’s 44 pages per month, and Robertson’s minimum amount of work in two years and others – Marvel and DC, according to their exclusive creators, have worked with them to make sure they are happy.
However, exclusive creators know that signing a deal like this is a tradeoff – if a DC exclusive creator gets a hankering to tell a Spider-Man story, it will have to wait, and likewise a Marvel exclusive creator who wants desperately to work with a DC character.
“It makes you a hostage to fortune in some ways,” Carey said. “If something goes wrong with your ongoing relationship with that company, you might end up in a situation where your work was being paid for but not used - which would be devastating when the deal came to an end. You'd be back out in the marketplace with no current credentials. I guess being genuinely freelance means you've got the best chance of keeping a very high profile.”
Also, as Robertson pointed out, comics can be somewhat political, and being in bed with one publisher for too long could affect you once you return to freelance status. “One can alienate themselves from the competition and if the contract ends, find they don't have anywhere to go, but that would be strange unless you really burned some bridges in the process. Another downside is that some writers I like working with and would like to work with have gone exclusive to DC. I won't be able to work with Warren Ellis again for a couple of years, and I never got the chance to work with my friend Brian Azzarello, and now they both are exclusive to DC. In some ways though this will force me to stand on my own and do what I can to emerge as a creator and hopefully write more and create my own titles, or make a mark on a title I'm working on.”
Either perceived or real, the limited flexibility and somewhat prescribed route a creator must travel (that is, creating what fits within the publisher’s breadth) were cited by some creators who do not, and aren’t seeking exclusive contracts.
“I like my freedom,” <a href="http://www.manofaction.tv" target="_blank"> Joe Casey</a> said. “I like the chance to act on opportunities that might come up that I never would've anticipated. I see exclusivity almost like employment. You're no longer a freelancer... you're an employee of the publisher. I'm much better suited to be my own boss right now. It's works for my particular lifestyle.
“The way the industry is right now, I don't think anything would persuade me to sign exclusive with anyone right now. Whether or not I'm exclusive doesn't affect my working relationships, so I'd prefer to stay independent. But there's not a publisher out there that could provide me with enough varied opportunities to persuade me to sign exclusive with them.”
And from Phil Hester: “Everyone I know who's been exclusive was working on a project that they ‘saved’ for when they would be out from under it.”
Ellis cited the same slight drawback. “If they don't like an idea of yours, you can't take it anywhere else. If it happens, I'll survive. I have lots of ideas.”
So what about CrossGen?
While they’ve been mentioned briefly in terms of exclusive relationships with creators, CrossGen stresses that it’s agreements with its writer, pencilers, inkers, letterers, and colorists are not like those that Marvel and DC have with theirs. According to Panaccio, CrossGen’s paperwork are “employee agreements (an example of which, CrossGen supplied to Newsarama),” not “exclusive contracts.” Just semantics? Not in Panaccio’s eyes. Essentially, CrossGen’s agreements with its creators go a few steps further than an exclusive contract with another publisher.
“From the employment agreement, the compensation we pay our creators includes regular paychecks, subsidized healthcare, insurance, and benefits plus profit sharing and equity,” Panaccio said. “So while the work is owned by CrossGen, the employees in turn own a piece of CrossGen. They’re guaranteed that, on the back end, as the profitability becomes greater for the company, they will actually reap benefits.
“Although, with most companies, when you talk about a profit sharing arrangement, in most companies, the investors have to recoup their investment, plus x percentage before any employees get any taste of profits,” Panaccio continued. “In our case, Mark is forgoing being paid back his initial investment in order to make sure that when profit comes into the company, the staff gets the first taste, which is something that any Wall Street Journal reported would call Mark nuts for doing.”
As a side note – CrossGen only owns the finished product – the artists own their art.
Original art is returned to them once a month once the books are printed. Founder Mark Alessi only asks for the right to get first dibs at buying some of the art before its returned for his personal collection and to hang on the walls of the CrossGen studio.
The main difference between CrossGen’s relationship with its creators and Marvel and DCs, said Panaccio, is the equity and profit sharing. This, according to Panaccio makes the CrossGen relationship much better than just an exclusive contract.
“On a freelance basis, an exclusive contract just means that nobody else can hire that particular creator,” Panaccio said. “Under this particular kind of employment agreement, it does more than just say, ‘You can’t work for anybody else,’ it helps ensure continuity, because we’re providing reasons for the artists and writers to stay within the company. We’re showing them the benefit of the payoff on the back end.
“How many issues did Jim Cheung do at Marvel? Not many. What was the benefit of him being exclusive? There really wasn’t one. The benefit of having him here with our agreement is that we have Jim, doing nine to ten issues a year at the highest level of his talent. I don’t think that’s something that anyone can argue – this is where the subjective crosses over to the objective.
“Let’s be honest, freelancers can get away with tanking a few pages out of 22, because half the time the editor’s just happy to get the damn page on time anyway. In this setting, you can’t tank a panel, and we’ve taken away the reasons why people would do less than their best work – they’re motivated and inspired to do their best.
“Our agreement motivates and inspires people, and it actually makes them want to be here,” Panaccio continued. “Many exclusivities become the ball and chain after a while. Once the creator gets out from under the yoke, it’s, ‘Thank God, now I can do what I want.’ Here, it’s a little bit different – they know they’ve got back end participation, they know they’ve got part ownership. They know that there is a greater level of satisfaction for them above and beyond.”
Because CrossGen employees are part owners, Panaccio said that there’s a fundamental difference in how they view the company compared to how exclusively contracted creators view their respective publishers.
“Because they have a piece of the action, they think more like this is their money,” Panaccio said. “If they steal a paper clip, a percentage of that paper clip is theirs anyway. So they look at it with the same fiscal responsible that your CFO is going to look at it with, which makes these decisions infinitely easier – they see the logic.
“For example, to cite a recent decision, if it’s money coming out of their wallet, they’re going to realize that it doesn’t make sense to bring a creator like Scott Beatty down here just to have the luxury of him being here. They can make do for the time being and do what they can to work together as a team.
“There is absolutely no doubt in anyone’s mind that the quality of the book would be enhanced by having him here in the studio all the time, but when you run the cost-benefit analysis, it’s very difficult to figure out just how much better the book would be, versus the amount of money that you’re going to spend to get that level of quality enhancement.”
Panaccio also pointed out the flexibility in the CrossGen agreements, citing Ron Marz and George Perez’s non-CrossGen work as examples of allowing creators to complete work they’d already committed themselves to. Also, Panaccio explained that no contract has a distinct term of employment. All are open-ended, and ongoing. “If a person wants to leave, all they have to do is give their two week notice,” Panaccio said. “Conceivably, everyone could come in here and do that today. That’s one of the prime differences between our agreements and exclusivity at other publishers – they’re stuck. If a creator figures out after one year of a two year deal that they hate the arrangement, too bad. They’re stuck with it for another year or pay a lawyer money to get them out of it.”
As such, any reference to CrossGen contracts having “terms” of one year or multiple years were most likely tied, according to CrossGen sources, to moving expenses, which CrossGen provides for their new creators. If the creator stays with CrossGen for a year, the loan is forgiven. If the creator does not stay for the full year, they must repay the company.
With all the perks, there are some stipulations to the CrossGen agreements. While they are generally flexible, Panaccio said, they’re not tailored to fit each individual creator. As such, creators (with a couple of exceptions) must move to Tampa. Also, there is the much ballyhooed three-month non-compete clause.
“For the purpose of solicitations, we can’t let our stuff become returnable,” Panaccio said. “If someone chooses to leave two weeks from today, we’ve already solicited books with their name on them, so you have to give us that window of 90 days, so we make sure that whatever we solicit is actually what’s going to be what comes out. But, like I said, if you put in your two-week notice, you’re gone. In special circumstances, we make special arrangements. Caesar’s a perfect example –here’s a guy who left his extended family in California, and now he has some issues he has to go out there and deal with. He came to us, and we placed him on sabbatical so he could take care of his situation. When he’s ready to color again, we’ll welcome him back with open arms. I would defy anyone to find copious examples of that in mainstream comics over the last ten years.”
Summing it all up, Panaccio said his best evidence for the employee agreements between creators and CrossGen is visual. “Look at Paul Pelletier’s Teen Titans versus Paul Pelletier’s Negation, if you look at Jim Cheung’s X-Force versus Scion, if you look at Butch Guice’s anything versus Ruse – if you look at the level of improvement in the artists, there’s an unmistakable fragrance of quality that has come from the guys’ work they have done here that did not exist to that extent with their previous work.
“Creators create well when they’re inspired and they’re motivated. Out in the freelance world, there are no guarantees, so artists are trying to do 10 or 12 pages in a week, or working their asses off to get the next gig. They have to be salesmen 20-30% of the time, just trying to get gigs, and the other 70% of the time, they’re trying to get caught up on the work they weren’t able to get done. It becomes this monster cycle that burns out and kills creators. Juxtapose that kind of existence against having a paycheck every two weeks, having taxes taken out, health benefits that you can attach your family to, and part ownership in the company you work for. Everything we built here at CrossGen was to engender both an environment and a legal justification for creators to feel comfortable, motivated, and inspired so they can do their best work on a regular, ongoing basis. I think we’ve achieved that.”
At the end of the day, creators, Quesada, and Panaccio all agree that exclusive relationships, be they contracts or employment agreements are having an effect upon the industry, and aren’t going away any time soon. Although no one is saying that every creator will sign on with a single publisher, virtually all contacted see more creators signing them in the future than less.
“Freelancers are the backbone of both companies,” Robertson said. “However, I think it's wise for Marvel to hire on guys that they can rely upon to put out regular books with a degree of quality that can be relied upon. I appreciate deeply that Marvel sees me as one of those creators and feel personally fulfilled that I have arrived at this place after years of struggling and working hard in this industry that I love like a bad girlfriend. I've seen both companies throw a lot of money to creators who seem to disappear form the shelves afterwards and produce very little. Ultimately, the industry will always rely upon freelancers, but in the end, with CrossGen employing a great deal of the creators that used to be Marvel and DC's mainstays, it has sent a message that camps are being formed and the best way to ensure you're going to have good books is employing and compensating the people that you can depend upon to produce said books. DC has offered exclusives to writers and Marvel seems to be going for artists, so that may speak volumes about what to expect from those two companies in the years to come.
“All in all, I think that as an industry, it's high time we reexamine the way comics are made when it comes to creators,” Robertson said. “There should be more compensation made to older creators, and chances for a healthy retirement. Companies as big as Time-Warner should be rewarding loyalty with loyalty. This cutthroat attitude that has forced many silver age artists to suffer in their later years when they are no longer commercially viable is disappointing and pathetic. Ultimately it drives the better creators to greener pastures, and leaves the comic industry a lesser place. The industry's best and brightest are looking for a better deal, perhaps in Hollywood or in advertising, when they could be creating their masterpieces for Marvel & DC or CrossGen. I hope that the idea of exclusivity is a growing trend that may lead to a more stable environment wherein to create comic art and will take the desperation out of our industry. With all the evolutions that comics have gone through, that is the one idea that needs to evolve as well.”